My Heart and Other Black Holes is the debut novel from Jasmine Warga from last year. It is a YA novel that deals with two depressed protagonists in some of the truest descriptions of being a teenager with depression that I have ever read. This is a good book, but probably not for everyone. I was alerted to this book’s existence by the five star review from Annie for Cannonball Read 7. While she and I agree on some points, I only rated this book […]
An archaeological dig into suburban life, teenage angst, and death
A startling, depressing, funny, painful glimpse into teenaged angst, The Virgin Suicides is Eugenides’ first novel and well-written but not a comfortable read. If you expect deep psychological insights into the phenomenon of suicide, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, the author reflects on adolescence, loss, regret, and the all too swift passage of time. One learns right from the beginning that the five teenaged daughters of the Lisbon family have all killed themselves, and with that horrifying fact now out in the open, the author proceeds […]
Existentialism and friendship in contemporary Japan
This novel was my first taste of Murakami, and while I found it a fascinating (and not Japan-specific) foray into the minds of 20-30 somethings, I found Murakami’s story rather emotionally chilly. Of course, any book which devotes at least half of its pages to death, death wishes, and repressed sexual urges, is bound to be more than a little chilly, even downright depressing, but the book is saved by a combination of sometimes lovely prose, a mystery that kept me turning pages almost despite […]
A story of family dysfunction and the impact of loss
A painful story of a dysfunctional family plagued by mental illness, Housekeeping is nonetheless beautifully written and highly evocative. Two young sisters Ruth and Lucille are left alone when their unmoored mother dumps them at their grandmother’s house at a tender age, and then proceeds to drive herself off a cliff and into a lake, the same lake that her own father—a dreamy, frustrated, and regret-filled man–had died in following a train wreck years earlier. Their aged Nona is a loving and gentle caregiver, but […]
Meh
This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself. Elyria has been […]
A Glamorous Tragedy
This YA novel, inspired in part by the life of Edie Sedgwick, follows the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of Addison Stone, an 18-year-old art phenom from Rhode Island who makes a huge splash on the NYC art scene before her untimely death. The story itself is bold and fast-paced (much like Addy) if a bit far fetched at times. Set in the current day, emails, Instagram photos of characters, and pictures of actual art works are peppered throughout the narrative, giving it a surprisingly […]
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